


Cinnamon

by nihilegi



Series: a study in inevitability [1]
Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Canon Compliant, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Internalized Homophobia, Internalized Sexism, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 11:50:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20741747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nihilegi/pseuds/nihilegi
Summary: I’d gotten over the initial bliss of simply seeing Boris again and was transitioning to a more familiar, Boris-fueled exasperation, but I still found myself obsessing over the mere sight of him.A missing scene from Antwerp.





	Cinnamon

**Author's Note:**

> I apologize for this being in first person, but I wanted it to read like an additional scene from the book.

The squeak of a single board in the hallway, about two doors down from the room I was staying in, was something that any normal person would write off. My obsession with the tiny sound was almost embarrassing – reminiscent of the times Pippa spent a holiday with Hobie and I, when I was a little too attuned to her noises. Though, this noise wasn’t one of Pippa’s, and I was far more attuned to noise in Antwerp than I ever was in New York.

Upon reflection, I suppose this wasn’t much like Pippa after all.

I held my newspaper – completely incomprehensible, written in Dutch – close to my chest to prevent it from rustling. I couldn’t afford to miss the sound, were it to occur again. I did not have to wait long.

“Boris, will you stop lurking in the hallway and just come in here?” I snapped, tossing the paper to the end of the bed as the necessity for discretion was lost. There was a muttered curse from the hallway, one I decidedly didn’t learn in Conversational Russian, before Boris stuck his head in my room.

“Potter! Hey,” he said, flashing me a white, too-perfect smile.

“Don’t ‘hey’ me.” He rolled his eyes at my abrupt tone, shouldering his way into my room.

“What—”

“You’ve been loitering outside for, what, fifteen minutes now?” I said, fidgeting with my glasses so I couldn’t look at him too closely. I’d gotten over the initial bliss of simply seeing Boris again and was transitioning to a more familiar, Boris-fueled exasperation, but I still found myself obsessing over the mere sight of him.

He wasn’t wearing a shirt (a profoundly stupid choice for the dead of winter in Northern Europe, but considering my own shirtlessness, I was in little position to judge) and he had on a pair of Adidas track pants that were a few inches too short, leaving his white ankles exposed to the air. I hyperfocused on this detail, because _this_ Boris – a slightly bedraggled one with ill-fitting clothes – was a Boris I could reckon with. My discomfort came from his neatly cut hair and his pearl white teeth, making him look almost decent. Almost handsome, even, a near perfect dupe for your typical globe-trotting European businessman (until he opened his mouth, anyway).

And as much as I tried not to, my eyes drifted to the bandage wrapped around his upper arm. He’d showed me his wound earlier, as the two of us endured a Christmas movie marathon in his living room. It was grotesque, entirely raw-looking, and having an injury such as that was certainly out of character for the worldly businessman image he was trying to project. This was a small comfort to me.

“Just checking if you were still alive,” Boris said, sounding irritated. I knew he was embarrassed he’d been caught lurking.

“I’m still alive. Just knock next time.” The irritation in my own voice matched his perfectly, his mood transferring to me and my mood transferring to him in an easy, mirrored exchange. We’d been bouncing off of each other like this for many years, and not even our time apart could change that. It’s how we ended up so philosophical and jaded in our youth: one of us would pose a grim, existential question and we’d just wind ourselves deeper and deeper down into sadness and self-pity. Not once did either of us ever say, “hey, maybe we should lighten up a smidge?”

A beat passed in silence, and then another. Boris didn’t leave, fidgeting anxiously by the door in what was likely a combination of chill and discomfort – he was trying to figure out how to ask or tell me something unfavorable. I could tell by the way his eyes seemed to look right through me. In an attempt to spare him, I reached down to the end of the bed and picked my newspaper up once again, shaking it out unceremoniously. I moved my eyes over the text, left to right, but I didn’t read a single word, and not just because of the language barrier.

“I’m thinking of leaving tomorrow. I’ve looked at flights out of Amsterdam,” I said indifferently, trying to feign normality so my host wouldn’t feel uncomfortable essentially kicking me out of his home.

“What? Why have you looked at flights?” Boris said. It was like a spell had been broken; he clamored up on my bed with no uncertainty in his movements and pushed the newspaper away from my face.

“Hm?”

“Why,” he emphasized, settling in close enough to me that I could see the goosebumps on his chest and arms, “are you looking at flights?”

“Um, to leave?” I tried. Boris cast an exasperated glance at the ceiling (as _if_ any god out there was still taking calls from him) and curled his legs under himself (ostensibly to warm his bare feet). It was a very young way to sit, and for a second I found myself impressed with his flexibility. Yoga or Pilates would certainly fit his European-businessman-projection. I wondered if there was a way I could ask him without it coming off as strange or overly-familiar.

“Potter…” Boris started, and I could tell immediately that I’d drastically misjudged the cause of his discomfort.

“Boris, you know I have to leave, right? I can’t stay here forever.” Unbidden to me, the words came out slow and careful, as if I was explaining the situation to a small child. Boris scoffed and batted at my shoulder, a little too hard to be considered playful. I tossed the newspaper to the ground.

“I know you have to leave, but not now. What is there for you in New York?”

“Um, Hobie. The business, Mrs. Barbour. Hell, _Kitsey_, my beautiful fiancée that you essentially had me leave at the altar to follow you across the world?”

“Shut up, was rhetorical,” Boris snapped, shaking his head at me. “And you do not love this girl, don’t act like I have done you some great disservice.”

“Boris, every good reason aside, it’s hardly like the Belgian authorities would just let me stay here forever.” He scoffed at me.

“I could get you Belgian passport! Gyuri could have it in under a week, and then you wouldn’t have to leave.”

My eyes left his over-eager face to focus on the wall clock behind him, mounted above the television set. Boris and I had parted ways nearly six hours prior, retiring to our separate bedrooms. It was currently almost four in the morning – in my illness, I’d lost all sense of the passage of time, and though I was recuperating, it seemed as if a normal sleep schedule would be the final thing to return to me.

Boris, however, had no excuse for being awake.

“Hey,” I said softly, gently. “You have a family in Sweden – a beautiful wife and beautiful children. You can’t keep me here as your dirty little secret to visit on the weekends.”

As I’d expected, this response sent Boris through a litany of emotions nearly simultaneously. First, there was shock on his face, but it was quickly eclipsed by a neutered sort of longing, which was immediately followed by anger. Boris always was too expressive: he was lucky few people knew him well enough to read him like I could.

“Theo,” he started (and this is how I could tell he was seriously angry with me), “whatever you are thinking was between us in Las Vegas… you are wrong. I am not _implying_ anything, there is no implication here! You are a good friend, and I am offering you a place to stay. You are no ‘dirty little secret.’” He spat the term like it was poison on his tongue. “Americans… no sense for hospitality!”

I waited patiently for him to stop shouting, though it was difficult. His anger – while expected – was giving me a migraine.

“Of course, Boris. I apologize for generally referring to the two years we slept with each other,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose.

“It was not ‘sleeping together’—”

“It was.”

“We just needed girls—”

“So you’ve said.”

“Damn it, Potter. Stop that! You know it makes me angry when you do that,” he huffed out, visibly deflating despite himself. I conceded – perhaps I was being obnoxious, but it was growing harder and harder to respect Boris’ clear wish to leave Vegas in the past, especially when he insisted on misremembering what we’d once meant to each other.

“Why are you really coming to check on me at this hour?” I asked him, keeping my same, gentle tone from earlier. I hated treating Boris like a skittish colt, but it was his fault for inviting the comparison so easily. Even in adulthood, he was wily and restless and unmanageable.

And even as I asked him, I could see the answer in his eyes. Boris didn’t let anything get to him – all the cruel injustices dealt to us in our youth sluiced off of him like water – but I really frightened him in Amsterdam. For a moment, he’d lost me forever, and he knew that. If he’d been even fifteen minutes later in storming my hotel, I’d be in police custody. We’d never see each other again, and despite his grand claims to the contrary, I knew I was the one person Boris couldn’t afford to lose.

“Potter,” he said, his voice dropping low. I nodded.

“I know.” For a moment, and only for a moment, I allowed myself to reach out and hold his cheek in my hand. His skin was cold, too cold, and there was the faintest trace of stubble on his chin. The last time I’d touched him like this, there was no trace of facial hair on either of us.

He shut his eyes and leaned into me for the length of one single breath, inhaling and exhaling reverently as I brushed my thumb back and forth across his cheekbone.

It occurred to me that we hadn’t spent much alone time together since we were reunited in New York. There was always someone from Boris’ posse with us, almost like a chaperone supervising an unmarried Victorian couple (and wasn’t _that_ an odd comparison for my sleep-deprived brain to conjure up). I couldn’t help but wonder if there hadn’t been anyone, if he’d simply showed up on my doorstep while Hobie was out one evening, if we would’ve ended up here far sooner.

But, like nothing had happened, he nudged my hand away from his face and locked his gaze on the blankets pooling at my waist, his brow furrowed. I was suddenly self-conscious of my own shirtlessness and was all-too-aware of my sobriety. This felt like uncharted territory and I couldn’t quite glean _why_.

“I think I’m going to sleep soon,” I told him.

“Okay.” He made no move to leave my bedroom. I sighed.

“You’re welcome to stay, but you need to be quiet. Turn on your table lamp and read if you’re too wired to sleep, I don’t mind the light.”

“Okay.”

With that, Boris clamored over me – all elbows and knees – to grab the book on my nightstand. It was something by Joseph Campbell, whose philosophy was often too optimistic to really resonate with me. It was an entertaining read, though, and I knew it would shut Boris up for a few hours at least.

I switched my lamp off right as he switched his on. He curled up under the covers, sighing in relief as he finally started to warm up. It was a king-sized bed, so there was a good bit of space between us, but every now and then he would fidget or turn a page a little too loudly, alerting me to his presence and, once again, making me ponder exactly what he wanted from me.

Placing my glasses on the nightstand, I rolled over onto my stomach, folding my arms under the pillow and turning my head away from my unexpected bedmate. I closed my eyes and tried counting down from one hundred. When that didn’t work, I counted down from a thousand. Still, sleep evaded me and I only became more and more certain that Boris was watching me.

“Can I help you?” I asked, reaching my wits’ end as I turned over to look at him. He didn’t avert his gaze, not embarrassed in the least to have been caught staring.

“You have new spots on your back,” he informed me, cocking his head as if he were greatly troubled by this fact.

“What?”

“Here, turn over again.” He didn’t wait for me to comply, simply dropping the book haphazardly on his nightstand and rolling me over onto my stomach again. I don’t know why I simply allowed him to do so.

“Boris, what the mother fuck.”

Boris ignored me, staring at the skin of my back in a way that made me feel supremely self-aware. I couldn’t really see him, even with the way my neck was craned, so the shock of his cold fingers on my skin caused me to jolt.

“Calm, Potter. I’m not going to hurt you,” he murmured in my ear. “This is what is bothering me so much.” He poked at one specific spot on my back, tracing a mole I knew I had there. “This? Is new.”

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, but I was afraid I was starting to understand.

“When we knew each other, when we were young, you had this spot.” His finger traced a line to another mole on my back. “And this one.” I felt his finger move once again. “But this one? Was not there in Las Vegas.”

My breath was stuttering and I tried to get myself under control before I answered him, so I could avoid giving away too much.

“Are you telling me you have the birthmarks on my back memorized?” I asked. Boris scoffed.

“Do not say it like it’s so strange. I saw you without shirt for most of our childhood, Potter,” he said dismissively.

And as much as he tried to wave it off, I couldn’t – for the _life_ of me – remember any of the cosmetic features of Kitsey’s body. Carole Lombard’s, either. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that someone could have a gun to my head and I wouldn’t be able to recall a single mole or freckle on any of the women I’d ever slept with, and here was Boris, trying to pass this off as _normal?_

“Potter?” He was starting to sound uncertain. I turned over abruptly to look at him, gripping at the white downy comforter to ground myself.

“You have a birthmark on your left hipbone. It’s smaller than a dime and barely two shades darker than your skin tone,” I said, the words rushing out of me, like I couldn’t have stopped them if I’d tried.

Boris fell silent, though his hand started fidgeting with the waistband of his track pants. Before I could think – and what was I even _supposed_ to think, at this point?! – I placed my hand on top of his own and, between the two of us, we inched his pants down just slightly.

I could tell two things immediately – one, there was the birthmark on his hipbone, exactly as I’d remembered it, and two, he was half-hard with no way of hiding this fact from me.

His breathing stopped and I prayed he wouldn’t freak out and deck me. It’d happened before, once or twice when we’d made the mistake of fooling around at his house instead of mine and his dad had come home unexpectedly. Mr. Pavlikovsky never caught on, _obviously_, but the mere sound of his key in the lock had been enough to send Boris reeling, shoving me away from him and scrambling to the other side of the bed with fear in his eyes.

Boris didn’t get scared often, but his father had a way of bringing it out in him. I hoped with everything in me that the man was dead in a ditch somewhere.

“Hey,” I whispered, reaching for Boris’ face again. He leaned into my hand, making steady eye contact with me, and I could read his mind. It was Vegas all over again and all pretenses were lost as I propped myself up, grabbing him by the shoulder and bringing our lips together at last. It almost felt victorious. It certainly felt inevitable.

Kissing was not something we _did_ as teenagers, except for a few notable occasions that served as exceptions to the rule. Boris and I were both aware that kissing crossed us over into something scary, something real that neither of us could write off as kids merely letting off steam. (As fucked up as it sounds, and it sounds pretty fucked up, I’d rather my father have walked in on me with Boris’ cock in my mouth than having walked in on us kissing.)

Back in Las Vegas, Boris only really kissed me to try and manipulate me into doing what he wanted.

“Come on, Potter,” he’d say, biting at my earlobe as his hands gripped my hipbones. “We don’t really need school today, no? We could stay here instead, together.” And then he’d kiss me, and then I’d abruptly stop arguing to wrestle him out of the shirt he’d pulled on during the earlier stages of our disagreement.

This kiss wasn’t like those. This was the way he’d kissed me before I’d left Vegas, soft and all-the-more devastating for it. This was not a transaction, this was a plea. _Stay._ _Pozhaluysta, stay._

He kissed me desperately, like he needed to touch every inch of me because he’d never get the chance again. As much as I wanted to pull away and reassure him that he didn’t need to rush, I knew I couldn’t promise him that. We were never meant to be something real, declaring our love for each other to our friends and families. I couldn’t even imagine what Mrs. Barbour’s reaction to that news would be. _Christ, Boris is my Tom Cable_, I thought unwittingly.

“Stop thinking,” Boris commanded, pushing and pulling me to get my pajama pants down my hips, and I was all too happy to comply.

“Wait,” I said, knitting a hand in his hair as he shifted further down on the bed.

“Christ, _what_?”

“What are you on right now?” My question caught him off-guard, and even as he held my dick in his hand, I could see him rethinking this. Rethinking everything.

“I… nothing. Nothing since earlier, during boring Christmas movie. That’s not… we should be on something, yes? I have stuff, in my room, I can be back—”

“No, that’s not…” I was frustrated at my own inability to communicate. The cruel irony is that any combination of narcotics would have transformed me into Hobie’s perfect salesman, because _that_ Theodore Decker knew all the right words and when to say them. But me? As sober as I was in that moment? I was completely at a loss.

But Boris seemed to understand my unspoken thoughts, judging by the way his eyes fluttered and his breath caught in his throat. He moved further down the bed, taking his place between my splayed thighs.

“Is fine,” he murmured, rubbing the head of my dick on his lips. “This? Nothing we haven’t done before, no?”

He shot me a wicked, _wicked_ grin before taking the head into his mouth, sucking far too lightly. _I will say, you are the only boy I have ever been in bed with! _The thought, the mere _thought_ of Boris not having done this since our last Vegas encounter was enough for me to get fully hard. No one else would ever see what I was seeing – Boris bobbing up and down with his cheeks hollowed, using his hand to work what he couldn’t fit in his mouth, eyes closed and brow furrowed like he was deep in thought. Grinding, so subtly I almost didn’t notice, against the fabric of his track pants.

“Oh, and this?” He said, pulling off with a wet popping noise. “This is nothing.”

“Of course.” I knew he wanted me to be rougher, to grab his hair and fuck up into his mouth until I came, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

“It means nothing,” he reminded me, looking up at me through his eyelashes as he rubbed the tip of my dick against his lips again, smearing them with precum. My eyes rolled back for a brief moment, but I quickly regained my bearings.

“Mmhmm.”

“And I am only doing this because you would not let me get us hookers,” he concluded.

“I know,” I said, tracing my thumb across his cheek as he started sucking me once again. If I wanted to be cruel, I could point out that he was far more accommodating than any hooker I’d ever heard of, but I would’ve preferred death over the inevitable argument that comment would cause. As it was, I merely choked out a gasp and tried not to tell him how perfect he was.

“You know,” he said, pulling off once again – and that’s something I didn’t miss, Boris pausing mid-blowjob for some profound, societal commentary – “Xandra isn’t here.”

“Please don’t mention Xandra while my dick is in your mouth.”

“I’m just saying! Is just us. Gyuri is out for the night. You do not need to be quiet, Potter. Let me hear so I can remember…”

Instead of finishing that sentence – which I’m fairly sure would have ended with something like “so I can remember, in case this is the last time” – Boris shrugged to himself in that flamboyant, Slavic way of his before redoubling his efforts. The hand he wasn’t using to jack me off, he used to grasp at the skin of my hipbone. I kept one hand in his hair (like he liked it), but slowly I allowed my other hand to drift to his. I grasped at his fingers, and this was ten times more intimate than my dick being in his mouth ever could be.

He turned his hand over to lace our fingers together, and I came then and there without giving him any sort of warning. My head slammed into the headboard behind me and I refused to open my eyes until I was sure I wouldn’t cry.

“Rude, Potter,” Boris said, coughing. “Warn a guy!”

“I’m sorry, it snuck up on me,” I gasped out. We looked at each other, staring for one beat, two, until we both started laughing uproariously. I hadn’t laughed like that since… well, since Las Vegas. My arms and legs were still weak, but I managed to pull Boris up in my lap, slotting our lips together easily as I fumbled with the front of his track pants.

He wriggled out of my grasp.

“Uh, there is no need for that,” he said, sounding almost embarrassed.

“My God, did you come from blowing me?” I asked.

“Yes. Shut up. I got caught in the moment,” he said, his cheeks flushing. I stared at the comforter, firmly instructing myself not to cry once again. If I cried, it made this a goodbye fuck. I couldn’t cry. Instead, I looked at Boris and firmly refused to imagine he was on the verge of tears as well. God, what had happened to us? One measly blowjob and we’re moments away from crying in each other’s arms?

“Ridiculous,” he said, reading my mind per usual as he wiped at his nose. The gesture was young and, God, _cute_ is the word coming to mind. This was so bad.

“Ridiculous,” I nodded, avoiding his gaze as I wrestled my pajama pants the rest of the way off and, as he did the same with his track pants, I pointedly didn’t watch him. I could have, but I didn’t. Otherwise I might stare at the post-orgasmic flush of his face and chest – he was so pale, much better suited to Europe than the killer Las Vegas sun – and trick myself into thinking there’s something between us other than our shared, tragic history and the painting.

But I pushed the painting from my mind. It was still too soon, and considering the painting was essentially synonymous with my mother, thinking about it in bed next to a sweaty, come-covered Boris was a touch inappropriate, perhaps.

“You’re still _thinking_,” he said, turning his bedside lamp off angrily. Honesty always came easier to Boris and I when we were in pitch darkness.

“I’m trying to stop.”

“What are you thinking about, even? Your girl?”

“Pippa? No.”

“Not the little redhead, Potter. Your _fiancée_.” He took on a nasally voice that I somehow knew to be an imitation of me, though it didn’t sound much like me at all.

“You know she never cried in front of me? I used to think she was shallow, completely emotionless,” I said with a scoff. I wasn’t sure where all this was coming from. “But that night, the night I caught her with Tom, she was crying to him. She was so, _so_ sad that I could feel it from where I stood, yards away from her. And my first thought wasn’t even ‘how could she do this?’ It was, ‘why did she need someone else to be sad with?’”

Boris listened in that careful, critical way of his. He gave notably terrible advice, but he was usually sympathetic towards me, even when I was blatantly in the wrong. I needed a little sympathy.

“You can’t expect emotion like that from a woman, Potter. Women are for children and families and companionship. Emotion, what is _real_, is shared between men. This is how things are. You wanted her to lean on you so you could lean on her, but that is not what is best for you.”

“And this is?” I asked incredulously.

“Of course! Is very Slavic way of thinking, for sure.”

It was too easy to turn over and pull him towards me, spooning him from behind. I pondered my response as I brushed my fingers over the birthmark on his hip. Even in the darkness, I knew exactly where to touch, because I knew him. I knew his body, I knew his mind.

“I’m not too sure this is a Russian thing, Boris,” I murmured into the skin of his shoulder, making him shiver.

“Maybe not. Maybe… is an us thing?”

“Maybe,” I acquiesced, though that hardly eased my mind. I wished there was a word for what Boris and I meant to each other, though sticking a label on things would hardly make it easier.

“Potter.”

“Yes?”

“Stay. We can stay here and we can figure it out,” he breathed. With my chin hooked over his shoulder as it was, I could feel the uptick in his heartrate. His fingers were tracing a pattern on my wrist, and if I were not obsessed with him like I was, I’d have no idea what that pattern could be. As it were, I recognized the feeling of him tracing _ya tebya lyublyu_ over and over and over again onto my skin.

And I didn’t, I _couldn’t_ mention that I hadn’t merely looked at plane tickets, I’d purchased one for a red-eye flight the following day. Hell, I’d even had the foresight to hire a car to transport me back to Amsterdam, at the risk of permanently offending Gyuri. It would be arriving at Boris’ front door in approximately sixteen hours. I did not mention this either, opting instead to kiss his shoulder before I burrowed into him, trying to make us both more comfortable. There was no point in ruining our last night.

_Ya tebya lyublyu_ on my wrist.

“Okay, I’ll stay,” I lied.

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Lana Del Rey's "Cinnamon Girl" - look up the lyrics, imagine the song from Boris' perspective, and try not to cry.
> 
> I have no idea where this came from. I wrote in an afternoon and it made me sad so here you go. My month and a half of studying abroad in Russia this summer taught me One Thing, and that thing is why Russian men are the way that they are. (Intricate Rituals.......) A lot of Boris' characterization came from my personal observations, and I hope it doesn't offend.
> 
> [my tumblr](http://www.acwrite.tumblr.com)
> 
> [my Boreo playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3lerVJT5H8LcAx6ozI3q7n?si=jm-GKDaBTi-gepGSuMKfjA)


End file.
